Today, organizations worldwide are looking for more effective, less costly ways to deploy, manage, and update an ever-increasing collection of software, data, and Web content to service the information-handling needs of their employees, business partners, and customers.
An application is a collection of information and data modelled, and organized and presented in a way to solve a business need. In many cases, however, the source environment is different from the target environment. The application must, therefore, be deployed. There is also a need for the application deployed to be updated on a scheduled or as-required basis.
Deployment may be thought of as the act of moving a customer application from one environment to another. For example, an application having been developed, it must be taken into a new environment, such as user communities. In order to do this, all the pieces that make up the application should be physically moved to and integrated into the new environment. In other words, it is a mechanism for deploying an application.
In the simplest possible terms, deploying an application is the movement of the “content” of the application from one environment (the source) to another (the target). Practically, moving the content of the application is only a small part of the act of deployment. There are other activities which precede and follow the movement of the content which are important parts of the deployment process.